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Copyright © Patrick Neveling, 2012

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2

A periodisation of globalisation according to the Mauritian integration into the international sugar commodity chain (1825-2005)

1

Patrick Neveling (University of Berne)

This paper shows that the analysis of commodity chains (CC) can be fruitfully employed to

respond to recent calls in the field of global/world history for a periodisation of globalisation.2

The CC approach is ideally suited for advancing global historians’ understanding of the way

that particular places are positioned within a changing capitalist world system. This is

important because it is this capitalist world system that ultimately defines globalisation in a

particular place and therefore also the periodisation of globalisation.

The place to be studied in this paper is Mauritius, a small island in the Western Indian Ocean

that has a very particular history of colonial and postcolonial integration into the capitalist

world system. The entry of Mauritius into the British Empire brought about a particular kind

of integration of the island into the capitalist world system. Central to this integration was the

production of sugar under the West Indian Sugar Protocol, with this ultimately turning

Mauritius from a free port into a plantation economy. This shaped the island’s economic and

political practice, and brought the formation of a range of institutions that sustained a high

degree of inequality among Mauritians by finding ever newer ways of conciliating socio-

economic mobility with exploitation.

I discuss Mauritian history through the framework of bilateral and multilateral trading

agreements that had significant impact on the sugar industry and kept the island economically

dependent on this single crop. This only changed when the postcolonial state succeeded in

diversifying the Mauritian economy during the 1970s and 1980s.3 Nevertheless, it can be

argued that Mauritian integration into the sugar commodity chain defined the emergence of

new sectors because trading agreements that negotiated market access in the agricultural

sector were extended to new industries that focused on the processing and assembly of raw

materials and semi-finished goods. The lighthouse role of sugar only changed with the

establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its differentiation of negotiating

trading agreements in the fields of ‘Agriculture’, ‘Non-Agricultural Market Access’ and

‘Services’. Another central aspect of studying a commodity chain is the respective production

regime and the inequality that it brings along. In Mauritius, sugar production was and is

highly profitable for the local bourgeoisie. Following British conquest this bourgeoisie

constituted itself as an alliance between the remaining French settler families on the one hand

and British traders and companies on the other. Later, other trading communities from the

1 I would like to thank Jonathan Curry-Machado, Robert Heinze, Tijo Salverda and Jarrett Zigon who have given

valuable advice in the process of writing and revising this paper. 2 See A. McKeown, ‘Periodizing Globalization’, History Workshop Journal 63:1 (2007), pp.218-30.

3 The most capital intensive and enduring attempt at economic diversification before 1968, when Mauritius was

granted independence, was the growing and processing of hemp into bags for packaging of Mauritian sugar.

Other attempts included the planting and export of tea. See P. Neveling, ‘The (Dis-)Comfort of Global

Commodity Chains: Colonial and Postcolonial New Deals for the Mauritian Economy’, conference paper, Re-Appropriating World Market Production: Commodity Chains in the Project of Postcolonial Development (1920-2000), Historical Institute, University of Berne, Switzerland, 2009, p.25.

3

Indian Ocean were incorporated into the bourgeoisie’s ranks, particularly Indian merchant

communities.4

Having discussed the inclusion of Mauritius in the 1825 West Indian Sugar Protocol, I divide

the paper chronologically into four broad periods: first, the long nineteenth century of intra-

empire trading agreements and economic diplomacy; second, between 1919 and 1937, when

the sugar sector acted in Mauritius as a system of income redistribution; third, the period

through the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement of 1951 up to the Lomé Convention of 1975;

and finally, the contemporary developments, shaped by the extension of the GATT into the

World Trade Organisation and a revival of free-trade ideology .

As this paper applies the analysis of commodity chains to periodise globalisation, it is

important to identify which strand within the wide-ranging field of commodity-chain analysis

is best suited for this endeavour. The following first section will therefore set out a theoretical

programme for aligning the analysis of global commodity chains with periodisations of

globalisation. This will include a review of recent as well as foundational works on CC

analysis and its offspring, the analysis of global commodity chains (GCC) and of global value

chains (GVC).

Commodity chains analysis and the periodisation of globalisation

In a critique of Topik, Marichal and Franck’s edited volume on commodity chains and the

building of the world economy,5 Arnold Bauer asks whether it is “as useful to tell that people

plant or mine certain commodities as it is to explain to whom the earnings in the export

stream accrue or why they are distributed the way they are”. He argues that the commodity-

chain approach (CC), by moving away from national or imperial structures and towards

“individual ‘commodity chains’” instead, fails to address the role of work and labour systems

within such chains and, foremost, the pressing concerns of underdevelopment, dependency

and poverty.6 This is a surprising assertion, because the analysis of commodity chains was a

crucial aspect of the study of the capitalist world system developed by Wallerstein and others,

who saw that competition within the interstate system could encompass notions of ‘wealth’ in

the seventeenth century as much as notions of ‘development’ in the twentieth:

From the point of view of state-machineries, regular, but not continuous,

alterations in the relative economic strength of localities, regions, and states can

be viewed (and indeed most often are viewed) as a sort of upward or downward

‘mobility’ of the state as an entity, a movement measured in relation to other

states within the framework of the interstate system.7

4 Clarence-Smith gives an excellent account of the early days of cooperation and competition between

Europeans, Africans and Asians in the wider region (W. G. Clarence-Smith, ‘The Cotton Textile Industry of

Sub-Saharan Eastern Africa in the Longue Durée’, Conference Paper: Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée, Hephzibah Christian Centre, Peduase, Ghana; The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

(WCFIA, Harvard University) in Partnership with the International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures,

Institutions and Economic Enterprise (IIAS), 2010). Here the focus is predominantly on culture as a marker for

difference and collaboration while in this paper the focus is also on inequality as such a marker. 5 S. Topik et al. (eds), From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World

Economy, 1500-2000, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 6 A. Bauer, ‘Commodity Chains: Revisiting the History of Latin American Global Exports’, Contra corriente 4:3

(2007), p.185. 7 I. M. Wallerstein, The Modern World - System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-

Economy, 1600-1750, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1980, p.179.

4

The explicit aim of the world-systems project was then to transcend the “methodological

nationalist approaches” to economic change. The study of commodity chains should instead

provide an empirical means to do exactly what Bauer laments is lost: to study the emergence

and changes of the international division of labour and surplus in a “long-range,

macrohistorical perspective”.8 Since the programme for studying commodity chains was first

developed, there have been numerous extensions, changes and diversions to it. I now turn to

discuss some of these briefly. This is in preparation for a later stage of my argument when the

material from Mauritius can be used to show that not all facets of commodity-chain analysis

are useful for the historian. Rather, it will become evident that some explicitly ahistorical

variants of this research programme provide fatal detours from the project.

The publication of Gereffi and Korzeniewicz’s edited volume Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism in 1994 took the analysis further, but also diverted the centre of attention from the

interstate system as the framework enabling the economic practice of capitalism. Instead,

commodity chains were portrayed as linked together in networks. In light of Bauer’s recent

critique it is important to note that the focus on networks still involved studying:

the acquisition and/or organization of inputs (e.g., raw materials and semi-finished

products), labor power (and provisioning), transportation, distribution (via

markets or transfers), and consumption.9

But the initial interest in the interstate system was replaced with a rather vague notion of

“social relations” that are said to inform the workings of commodity chains:

The analysis of a commodity chain shows how production, distribution, and

consumption are shaped by the social relations (including organizations) that

characterise the sequential stages of input acquisition, manufacturing, distribution,

marketing, and consumption. The GCCs approach promotes a nuanced analysis of

world-economic spatial inequalities in terms of differential access to markets and

resources.10

Such a shift in focus created opportunities for researchers with more mundane agendas to

develop their own understandings of what was to be studied. Bair identifies a movement from

a more network-based Global Commodity Chain (GCC) approach towards a Global Value

Chain (GVC) approach in the early twenty-first century.11

The main proponent of the GVC

approach, Michael Porter, focuses particularly on how one activity performed within a firm’s

chain influences the cost or effectiveness of other segments within the same chain.12

It is

against the transfer of this notion of value generated through competitiveness into research

agendas of the social sciences that this paper argues in part. While to some extent this is in

line with Bair’s demand for a stronger focus on market institutions in research,13

it is

necessary to (re-)expand the research agenda further. The problem here lies with one of the

8 J. Bair and M. Werner, 'Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism: A

Disarticulations Perspective', Environment and Planning A, 43/5 (2011), p.988. 9 G. Gereffi, M. Korzeniewicz, and R. P. Korzeniewicz, 'Introduction: Commodity Chains and Global

Capitalism', in G. Gereffi and M. Korzeniewicz (eds.), Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, Westport,

London: Praeger, 1994, p.2. 10 Gereffi, Korzeniewicz & Korzeniewicz (1994), p.2. 11

J. Bair, ‘Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains: Looking Back, Going Forward’, Competition & Change 9:2 (2005), pp.153-80. 12

Gereffi, Korzeniewicz & Korzeniewicz (1994), p.6. 13 Bair (2005), p.171.

5

central ideological distinctions that the capitalist world system has produced itself and that

has found its way into the social sciences:

The conventional view in the social sciences, in political discourse, and in the

mass media is that capitalism and the market economy are more or less the same

thing, and that state power is antithetical to both. Braudel, in contrast, sees

capitalism as being absolutely dependent for its emergence and expansion on state

power and as constituting the antithesis of the market economy.14

It is evidenced then that the shift in focus from the interstate system to social relations and

further to intra-firm networks that came along with a relabeling of the research programme

from CC to GCC to GVC does no longer allow us to undisclose the ideological distinction

between capitalism, market and state. Instead, GVC analysis has shifted the focus to one side

of the coin: the market. When Bauer urges us to return to a focus on national or imperial

structures, he wants to look at the other side of the same coin. As the following sections will

show, CC analysis instead has the potential to look at both sides of the coin as well as the

edges, and thus realise that the structures represented on both sides are complementary rather

than distinct.

The Mauritian position within the capitalist world economy prior to 1825

Mauritius is a small island nation-state in the south-western Indian Ocean that has a very

particular history of colonial and postcolonial integration into the capitalist world system. One

of the few European colonies that were uninhabited at the time of colonisation, it has since

then been ruled by the Netherlands (1635- c.1700), the French (1735-1810), the British (1810-

1968), and a locally based postcolonial bourgeoisie alliance with certain Fabianist/democratic

elements (1968-present). Hence integration into the capitalist world economy was quite a

peculiar process. Contrary to parts of the world where European powers faced the problem of

being buyers rather than sellers of commodities,15

prior to 1800 Mauritius was a prototype

example of the establishment of European infrastructure in the Indian Ocean.16

Dutch settlement never exceeded three hundred individuals. Colonisers were heavily

outnumbered by the population explosion of rats and left the island rather unaffected apart

from the extinction of the endemic dodo birds and cutting down of substantial parts of the

forest to supply timber for the Dutch fleet. The challenge they faced was to sustain life and

profitability on a remote colony that lacked exploitable labour and potential collaborators who

could have provided knowledge of the local setting. Faced by this, the Dutch struggled to

maintain Mauritius as a port of call on the route to the Asian spice trade and abandoned the

island in the early eighteenth century.17

The Dutch departure was followed by the opening up of the island to capitalist exploitation in

the eighteenth century, with the arrival of the first French colonialists from the neighbouring

island La Reunion, who named it Ile de France. These pursued an ideology of Physiocratic

economics, and ventured into forms of pre-industrial capitalist agriculture. Thus, Mauritian

14

G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, London, New York:

Verso, 2002 [1994], p.10. 15

See I. Wallerstein, ‘The Great Expansion: The Incorporation of Vast Zones into the Capitalist World Economy

(ca. 1750-1850)’, Studies in History 4:1/2 (1988), p.94. 16

K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy,

Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. 17

P. J. Moree, A Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 1598-1710: A Fruitful and Healthy Land, London: Kegan

Paul International, 1998.

6

integration in the first two centuries of settlement was comparatively independent of pre-

colonial economic practices and markets. Competition was not a matter of how to integrate a

local or regional structure into the emerging Europe-centred world economy, but how to

establish a regional structure that could generate profit on the fringes of world trade. The

French established a free port on the island, with this emphasis on ‘free trade’ based on

privateering. The island’s economic booms during the French period therefore coincided with

the Seven Years’ War of the mid-eighteenth century and the Napoleonic Wars around the turn

of the nineteenth century. Because of its strategic location on the maritime trading routes

between Asia and Europe, Mauritius became known as “the star and the key of the Indian

Ocean” – since most European trade with Asia had to remain sea-bound, via the Cape of

Good Hope, due to the Eurasian overland trade routes being controlled by the Ottoman,

Indian and Chinese empires.18

Because of this favourable strategic location, for most of the eighteenth century licenses to

hijack Anglo-Indian ships and trade the stolen goods were sold in the Port Louis free port.19

The British conquered the island in 1810 and Mauritius formally became part of the Empire in

the Vienna treaty of 1814. Britain granted the French-Mauritian ruling class rights to pursue

their cultural practices and keep reminiscences of the former legal-political structure. From

then on this structure worked below the superstructure of British colonial administration.20

The hierarchy that positioned the French colonisers as the subjects of British rule was to

determine the patterns of struggles within the local society and economy for the decades to

come. Through the implementation of a node in the sugar commodity chain, the British

Empire was equipped with sufficient powers to enforce the new codes of conduct as a process

for embedding the Mauritian economy and society into the Empire’s economic structures.21

Due to the shift to a plantation economy, the demand for labour increased and the slave

population expanded rapidly as ever more slaves were imported despite the British ban on

slave trading in 1814. Within the sugar-cane commodity chain, slaves were positioned at the

extreme edge of the production side. Their position as well as their resistance must therefore

be interpreted from the perspective of the economic calculus within the early years of

Mauritian sugar-cane production: slaves were labourers and fixed capital assets framed by a

labour regime with an inherent technology of surveillance, enforcement and a legal code.

These assets had maintenance costs and were subject to speculation, as they could be bought

and sold with profit on the market. All changes following Mauritian integration into the

Empire’s preferential commodity chain in 1825, particularly the abolition of slavery, must

therefore be understood as the ‘real’ incorporation of Mauritius into the capitalist world

system by the then dominant power: the British Empire.22

18

Pomeranz (2000). 19

Allen (Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1999, pp.19-21) provides an insightful comparison of the commodities produced on Mauritius, and the

much higher monetary revenues in trade in privateered goods. 20

C. Boudet, ‘La Construction Politique d’une Identité Franco-Mauricienne (1810-1968): Le Discours

Identitaire comme Gestion de la Contradiction’, Kabaro/Revue Internationale des Sciences de l’Homme et des Sociétés 3:3-4 (2005), pp.3-44. 21

K. Polanyi, ‘Die Wirtschaft als eingerichteter Prozeß’, in K. Polanyi, Ökonomie und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979, pp.219-44. 22

See G. Arrighi, ‘Spatial and Other “Fixes” of Historical Capitalism’, Journal of World System Research 10:2

(2004), pp.527-39.

7

Embedding Mauritius: the 1825 integration into the West Indian Sugar Protocol

Crucial for Mauritius and its incorporation into the capitalist world system was a substantial

shift and revolution in the till then small agricultural sector. This happened in 1825.23

The

privateering-based Mauritian free-port economy was modulated into a mono-crop economy

based on sugar plantations due to its integration into the preferential West Indian sugar-tariff

system at work in the British Empire. From then on, if the island’s Franco-Mauritian

economic elite “wanted to make money under British rule... they had to produce

commodities”.24

The establishment of large-scale capitalist agriculture on the island meant a

significant move towards Mauritian integration into the British-dominated global system. But

this was not only based on the production of sugar cane; with it came a bundle of legal

structures, morals of trade and codes of conduct that had to be implemented along the

commodity chain of sugar. Crucial to the enforcement of these new rules was the way in

which the chain and its nodes were controlled:

There are two primary loci where one can create large nodes of decision-making

bodies. One can group primary production in large units – what we might call the

‘plantation’ solution. Or one can create large nodes at a stage after the initial

production zones in the commodity chain. For example, some large ‘merchants’

(what in French are called négociants as opposed to traitants or commerçants) can

station themselves at bottlenecks of flows. It is not enough, however, to create a

quasi-monopoly or oligopoly of merchandising. It is also crucial for this (let us

call him) large scale merchant (or merchant-banker) to establish a dependency

upon him on the part of a mass of small producers.25

In other words, a periodisation of globalisation for Mauritius along the lines of a commodity-

chain analysis begins with sugar. This commodity substituted the bottlenecks of flows created

by French piracy before 1810, which basically relied on the island’s strategic positioning in

the Europe-Asia trade; and the failure of the French East India Company to establish

commercial agriculture in Mauritius.26

When French Isle de France fell to the British Empire in 1810 the island not only received a

new name (Mauritius); it suddenly became part of the Empire’s market that was significantly

bigger and more profitable than that of the declining French Empire. What this meant in terms

of future economic options took the Franco-Mauritian upper class little time to realise. With

demand for sugar on the British home market significantly higher than in France,27

sugar

production quickly increased after 1815, when the earlier 36-shilling duty for exports to the

British market was replaced by a 10-shilling duty for the new crown colony. Production was

ten times higher in the early 1820s than in 1810.28

A driving force behind the transformation

of the domestic economy was the first British governor, Robert Farquhar (1810-1817, 1820-

1823). Accounts differ as to whether he realised himself that sugar cane was better suited for

23 See Allen (1999), p.12. 24

W. K. Storey, Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997, p.26. 25

Wallerstein (1988), pp.113-4. 26

M. Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius, Durham & London: Duke

University Press, 2005, p.61. 27

S. W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power the Place of Sugar in Modern History, London: Penguin Books, 1986,

pp.188-90. 28

V. Teelock, Bitter Sugar: Sugar and Slavery in 19th Century Mauritius, Moka: Mahatma Ghandi Institute,

1998, pp.42-3.

8

the rough Mauritian climate than coffee, indigo, cloves or nutmegs;29

or whether he was

pushed to negotiate duties equal to Caribbean sugar by the Mauritian planters.30

However, as

there was no private banking system in Mauritius before the 1830s,31

planters depended

heavily on the colonial government’s financial support, and thereby the British established

their crucial position as the island’s merchant bankers.

Another way through which economic policy on the island was determined and embedded via

London was connected to long lasting disputes between the Colonial Office and the British

East India Company over the terms of free trade or import/export duties.32

Mauritian planters

had already been sending memorials to London, demanding that the extra 10-shilling duty

paid on East Indian sugar that was supposed to give the West Indies a competitive edge be

waived. When Farquhar left for good to London in 1823 he started campaigning for the

Mauritian planters’ rights to equal market access, and was supported in this by the new

governor Cole.33

But Mauritian efforts to establish large-scale sugar-cane plantations faced a

powerful enemy. Caribbean plantations in those days were mostly run by businessmen who

not only lived in Britain, but had substantial influence in the House of Commons, or were

even members of the House themselves. The following quote from an article in the London Times, published on the day of the third reading of the Bill granting Mauritian sugar equal

import conditions as West Indian sugar, indicates why campaigning had been successful:

Indeed, if nothing more could be adduced in favour of Mauritius than the promise

made at the conquest of the island, that all the benefits should follow the

possession which were enjoyed by the other British colonies, it is difficult to

conceive how the pledge could be forfeited without a blot on the national

honour.34

Thus, the amendment of the bill in 1825 sheds light on the way the British public constructed

its relationship to the French colonists in Mauritius: as they were as white and racist as the

new British rulers were, they had the same rights to the Empire’s market – a concession rarely

granted to non-European populations.

My analysis here differs from other works on Mauritius that have interpreted the shift to a

sugar mono-crop economy as placing the Franco-Mauritian plantocracy in a nutshell to sail

the high tides of the world market. Allen states: “Two principal factors governed domestic

capital formation in Mauritius after 1810: the world market price for sugar and the industry’s

profitability”.35

This notion identifies a pattern of trade that Gereffi et al. have called a

29

A. Macmillan (ed.), Mauritius Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, & Resources, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2000 [1914], p.44. 30 Teelock (1998), p.43. 31

After British take-over, the Colonial Bank of Mauritius, Bourbon (Reunion) and Dependencies had been

established in 1812 but operation ceased in 1813 (L. Berthelot, Histoire de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie De Maurice, Port Louis: Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Maurice, 1991, p.45). In 1825, the

influential Franco-Mauritian plantation owner and politician, Adrien D’Epinay, founded the Banque de Maurice, which was a substantial disaster in terms of performance. More successful was the foundation of the Mauritius

Commercial Bank, a joint venture of Mauritian and British merchants under the leadership of James Blyth (S.

Selvon, A Comprehensive History of Mauritius, Port Louis: M.D.S., 2001, pp.201-8) − a bank, that remains the

most influential on Mauritius. 32

Storey (1997), p.26. 33

Teelock (1998), pp.43-4. 34

The Times, 6 June 1825. 35 Allen (1999), p.27.

9

“buyer-driven commodity chain”.36

Mauritian planters, according to Allen, had no control

over the prices their product fetched on the London market, for traders determined these. 37

But the problem with this perspective is that Allen focuses on estate management throughout

his study to an extent that one wonders if this had been the sole variable through which profit

could be generated. In a similar way to the firm-centred approach of GVC analysis, Allen puts

capitalism and the market on one side and the state on the other side of the coin. The

amendment of the 1825 Bill highlights two other factors that were significantly more decisive

for the profitability of the Mauritian sugar industry than estate management. These factors

underline that Mauritian sugar constituted the antithesis of the concept of the market economy

that features so strongly in Allen’s explanation of the tragedy of the Mauritian plantocracy:

first, the role of bilateral and multilateral trading agreements substantially influenced market

prices via regimes of market access and export/import duties; and second, the international

sphere of front and back room diplomacy of lobbying organisations opened the doors to

certain markets, determined the entrance fee and closed the doors to others.

Global (intra-empire) trading agreements and economic diplomacy from 1825 to 1919

Mauritian entry into large-scale sugar production coincided with the end of sugar’s era as

“England’s single most important import.” But whereas West Indian sugar exports came

crashing down in the following decades, Mauritian production and export expanded rapidly.

Even after the Corn Laws were repealed in 1832, production continued to increase until 1845,

when Britain completely abolished preferences on its market in the Sugar Equalisation Act

and sugar prices fell rapidly.38

Disagreement on the rules and morals of the trade nevertheless

arose when Mauritian planters realised that slavery would be abolished. Clashes between their

ranks and the British intensified the closer the date for the final abolition of slavery in 1835

approached.

As early as the eighteenth century, an imagination of the island’s development prospects

along the lines of labour shortage had been established. While slavery had been transformed

into an ever more inhumane regime after the introduction of the Code Noir in Mauritius, a

second layer of perception as to how the working population was divided into race clusters

had become inscribed into Franco-Mauritian minds.39

The end of legal slave trading in 1814

triggered illicit trade in the following decades;40

and at approximately the same time, contract

workers from the vast British possessions in India were gradually imported to substitute the

slaves on the plantations.41

The latter business led to numerous intra-empire quarrels, because

36 Gereffi et al. (1994), pp.10-1. See also P. Dicken, Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century, London: Sage, 2003, p.19. 37

Allen (1999), p.27. 38

V. A. Mahler, ‘Britain, the European Community, and the Developing Commonwealth: Dependence,

Interdependence, and the Political Economy of Sugar’, International Organization 35:3 (1981), p.473. 39

Vaughan (2005). 40

R. B. Allen, ‘Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles

during the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History 42:1 (2001), pp.91-116. 41 Opinions differ on when exactly contract workers were first introduced. It seems plausible that this process of

pooling new labour reserves was opened up by endeavours of the colonial administration that had Indian contract

workers build the first road crossing the Mauritian central plateau and connecting the two main ports in 1818

(Teelock 1998, p.68). It should also be kept in mind that the slave markets in the Indian Ocean were by no means

limited to certain regions, but that besides Africans, substantial numbers of Indian and Indonesian slaves were

sold to Mauritius. The linear narrative of Mauritian population composed of French settlers, African slaves and

Indian contract workers who came to the island in successive phases should rather be understood as the present

regime’s idea of identity politics than as analytically grounded. While Benedict (Mauritius: Problems of a Plural Society, London: Institute of Race Relations, 1965), but especially Eriksen (Common Denominators: Ethnicity,

10

British governors in Mauritius sought to support ‘their’ plantation owners with cheap labour

whereas governors in India tried to protect ‘their’ colonial subjects from the slavery-like

working conditions in Mauritius and to improve the contracted workers’ travel and living

conditions instead. These two succeeding regimes of coerced labour determined the labour

process on Mauritian plantations throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.42

Of particular interest for Mauritian integration into the sugar commodity chain is the

transition from one system to the other.

The abolition of slavery brought fresh capital to Mauritius in the form of a £2 million

compensation. This capital was invested mainly in the acquisition of new milling

technologies. On top of this, after a furious showdown with the colonial administration, an

attempt on government by planters from the south-eastern district of the island, and a general

strike against the installation of a new protector of slaves,43

Mauritian slave owners managed

to further negotiate the right to association, print a newspaper and open a banking house on

the island. It needs to be explained how, after the abolition of sugar duties and slavery,

Mauritius quickly − much to the surprise of most British experts – became the main sugar

exporter in the imperial market.44

Two developments seem central for this quick acquisition

of market share.

One advantage, although at first sight anything but obvious, was the short duration of

Mauritian sugar planters’ businesses. Whereas the Caribbean estates had amassed substantial

debts and therefore a substantial amount of the compensation paid in 1832/33 went into

liquidation,45

no such process can be found in sources on Mauritius:

Thus we can say that, in the 1830s, the West Indies were sold up, largely for the

benefit of the factors; and even this repatriation of capital could not have been

done without twenty million pounds of the British taxpayers’ money.

The money received by Mauritian slave owners seems to have gone exactly where the money

in the Caribbean did not go: into “investment in social overhead capital and agricultural

improvement”. 46

A second factor was the planters’ ability to adjust to the new rules of the market. How strong

the contrast to the old modes of production was deserves additional emphasis here: Mauritius

had shifted from a free-port economy to a plantation economy, turned from slavery to contract

labour, and moved its bottleneck strategy from privateering in the Indian Ocean’s waters to

lobbying in the London offices of the colonial administration. All these developments had

taken place within only thirty years. Although even during field research in 2003 and 2004 I

Nation-Building and Compromise in Mauritius, Oxford: Berg, 1998) and most recently Boswell (Le Malaise Créole: Ethnic Identity in Mauritius, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006) walk into this trap of Mauritian nation-

building narratives, Christopher (‘Ethnicity, Community and the Census in Mauritius, 1830-1990’, Geographical Journal 158:1 (1992), pp.57-64) perfectly demonstrates the shortcomings of long-term British ethnicisation

policies in colonial and postcolonial times. 42

Tinker tries to link the two regimes even closer, calling contract labour A New System of Slavery (London:

Oxford University Press, 1974). 43

C. Boudet, ‘Les Abolitions de l’Esclavage à Maurice et la Construction d’une Identité Franco-Mauricienne’, in

E. Maestri (ed.), Esclavage et Abolition dans L’Océan Indien 1723-1860, Saint-Denis de La Réunion & Paris:

Université de La Réunion & L’Harmattan, 2002, pp.255-66; and Boudet (2005). 44 D. Bräutigam, ‘Strategic Engagement: Markets, Transnational Networks, and Globalization in Mauritius’, Yale Journal of International Affairs 1:1 (2005), p.67. 45

R. B. Sheridan, ‘The West India Sugar Crisis and British Slave Emancipation, 1830-1833’, Journal of Economic History 21:4 (1961), pp.548-9. 46 Pares (1960), cited in Sheridan (1961), p.549.

11

was surprised how many Franco-Mauritians still held strong racist ideas and seemed tragically

stuck in a past they would never get back,47

ever since the abolition of slavery they have

managed quite well to lure the outside world into believing that they were adherents of the

free market and victims of the marginal position of Mauritius within the geography of world

trade.

Mauritian entrepreneurs responded to the beet-sugar induced difficulties on the world market

with the establishment of an institution to better represent their interests in 1827. In 1850,

they called again to London for a green light to establish a Chamber of Commerce in

Mauritius. Whereas, given its charter, the first Chamber had mainly been intended to provide

an infrastructure for facilitating prosperity and development, its re-establishment envisaged

the following objectives outlined in its charter:

to receive and collect all information concerning subjects of commercial interest,

with the aim to remove all the disadvantages from these and to right the wrongs;

to consult authorities and individuals on these issues;

to establish a code of ethics aiming to simplify and facilitate commercial

transactions for those who are involved therein;

to arbitrate disputes among parties who desire to avoid lawsuits and who desire to

submit themselves to the judgements of the chamber and accept these.48

This demonstrates that it was set up only for those Mauritian traders who were already

running established businesses. The envisioned introduction of a code of ethics points to a

strategy of strengthening internal cohesion and implementing a local court-like system

disclosed to British authorities. Whereas these two intentions in the charter must be read as

references to the Chamber’s internal functions, references to the gathering and spread of

information target outward-bound activities of crucial importance: Mauritius was on the

periphery of the global system of sugar trade in the 1820s, but had become ever more central

in terms of production capacity and technology by 1850. What was scarce, though, were

technologies and measures of authority to gain political influence on the decision makers in

London’s political and diplomatic circles.

A crucial role in the enterprise to change Mauritian positioning was given to the leading

Mauritian nineteenth-century shipping and marketing company, Blyth Brothers & Co.49

The

former director of this company, James Blyth, had already been central to the first successful

establishment of a banking house in Mauritius (1830), and subsequently the company set up

shipping activities. In 1850 Mauritius, it was anything but easy to gather information on

European market developments. As the island was not connected to the emerging system of

steamship lines linking Europe and the Indian Ocean,50

travel times were long. This caused

problems even in the simplest forms of communication such as the transmission of letters by

ship between London and Mauritius. As early as 1854 the then president of the Mauritian

Chamber of Commerce (MCC), Mr Wiehe, complained in furious letters about the lack of

47

For a similar observation, see Boudet (2002). 48

Berthelot (1991), p.15. 49

The following section is based on a company history of Blyth Brothers & Co. Ltd. (M. Lagesse, Blyth Brothers and Company Limited, 1830-1980, Cassis, Port Louis: Blyth Brothers and Company Limited, 1980). 50

In 1851, the legislative council of Mauritius granted £12,000 annually to the General Screw Steam Company (represented by H.D. & J. Blyth & Greene Co.) for a regular service line to Aden, where passengers disembarked

and continued via land to a Mediterranean port and from there to Marseille. The service ceased after only two

years of existence (Lagesse 1980, p.111).

12

steamships connecting Port Louis to the outer world.51

Blyth Brothers were active not only

establishing regular shipping lines to serve Mauritian commercial needs, but also held various

consulates (e.g. Italy, Netherlands, United States of America, Belgium, Austria/Hungary) in

Port Louis, and in 1870 represented 32 international banks (e.g. Deutsche Bank, Dresdner

Bank, The Bank of New York) plus various international insurance companies.52

Close co-

operation between the company and the MCC manifested itself further when Blyth Brothers

director H. J. Jourdain was elected Chamber president in 1864. In the following decades all

Blyth Brothers successive directors came to hold both posts.53

Furthermore, the company’s

offices in London functioned as a non-permanent representation of the MCC, and from there

dinners with British members of parliament were arranged while Blyth Brothers became

involved in buying and selling land and plantations in Mauritius.54

The MCC itself started lobbying for a telegraphic cable connection to Britain in the 1850s

(though they were not successful until 1869) and succeeded in lifting import duties on

machines used in sugar factories in 1853.55

When in 1854 London sugar tariffs fell, a system

of differential import rights based on polarisation was introduced. The MCC in co-operation

with the Chamber of Agriculture (MCA) for the first time sent one from their ranks to London

to lobby for a better import regime for Mauritian sugar with high polarisation.56

Although

they did not succeed, this first mission has been interpreted as the advent of Franco-Mauritian

private sector diplomacy in London.57

As the efforts had not brought the intended harvest, the

MCC went on to council Mauritian planters on how to best grain their sugar after the British

trading company M. M. Travers & Sons had been consulted, and gave advice on how to best

advertise test packages of Mauritian sugar without walking into the trap of advertising sugar

of too high quality and then paying indemnity for the difference in quality of the bulk cargo

delivered.58

Nevertheless, the 1860s decline in prices for Caribbean sugar on the London market was a

factor no lobbying at the Colonial Office could have turned into a benefit for Mauritius.

Therefore, the island turned to the British colonies India and Australia, and managed to

establish a substantial market in both. Sugar production had risen to 150,480 tons in 1862,59

and already in 1863 Bombay was buying 10,000 tons of Mauritian sugar while at the same

time substantial quantities of rice, flour, lentils and grains moved in the other direction.60

The

tightened commercial link between the two colonies was followed up by the introduction of

the Indian rupee as Mauritian currency.61

Up to the First World War, India was to remain a

major market for Mauritian sugar. In 1899, first the Indian colonial government and, in a later

vote, also the House of Commons supported the imposition of countervailing duties on

51

Berthelot (1991), pp.29-33. 52

Lagesse (1980), pp.112-4. 53 Berthelot (1991), pp.153-7. 54

Lagesse (1980), p.120. 55

Berthelot (1991), pp.44, 56, 72. 56

This system of distinction via polarisation stands in contrast to most assumptions of an entirely duty- and

quota-free British imperial market as presented by most authors (e.g. Mahler 1981: 475). Osterhammel and

Petersson (Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen, München: Beck, 2007, pp.60-3),

for example, equate the era of free trade, which they date from 1846 to 1880, with the emergence of a global

economy. 57 Bräutigam (2005). 58

Berthelot (1991), p.87. 59

Lagesse (1980), p.118. 60

Berthelot (1991), p.60. 61 Lagesse (1980), p.118.

13

bounty-fed sugar imported to India in the interest of Mauritius.62

Only when the European

demand for sugar rose, with the beginning of the war in 1914, did the British government pool

the colony’s production. As sugar was to be refined at 99.5 per cent for the British market, as

opposed to 96 per cent for the Indian market, and Mauritian factories had to adjust to the new

percentage, from 1914 onwards the island’s sugar was again part of the European market.63

Besides the necessity for the British government to substitute German and Austrian beet-sugar

imports with Mauritian sugar, a vivid example of the importance of Mauritian sugar was the

German import/export embargo enforced by the warships Koenigsberg and Emden during the

first months of 1914.64

To sum up, the period between Mauritian integration into the British Empire’s sugar

commodity chain and the First World War was characterised by two connected developments.

The first of these was the introduction of the sugar regime itself. This meant a change of

economic strategies. With the new regime of trade and its morals, an adjustment of labour

regimes on the production side of the commodity chain was enforced and Mauritian

plantations had to shift from slave to indentured labour. But indentured labour was anything

but the system of free citizens selling their labour force on the market as preconditioned by

Marx for capitalist economies. Ideally, contract labourers were free to work anywhere they

wanted when the contracts ended after five years. During the difficult years following 1860,

the Franco-Mauritian plantocracy reacted by outsourcing parts of their business. In the early

1870s, a large-scale process of morcellements (division) began, and substantial plots of cane

land were parcelled and sold, turning former contract workers into smallholders. While this

process in Mauritian nation-building narratives often is described as emancipation, it

coincided with the centralisation of the mill system that brought the number of sugar factories

down by nearly 90 per cent from 1860 to 1937, from 303 to 38. While the average annual

extraction capacity of mills multiplied in the same period from 450 to 8,210 metric tons of

sugar, the morcellement hardly brought prosperity to the smallholders.65

Allen has focused his

detailed analysis of the morcellement on the years before 1914. But a large acreage changed

hands from 1914 to 1921 when sugar prices were at an all time high. Many smallholders had

bought their plots at peak prices in the wake of the abolition of indenture. This meant that

huge profits went to landowners and to a new professional group: estate agents. Land was

often bought, parcelled and sold by joint venture companies of Franco-Mauritians and traders

of Indian descent. While the estate-agency business helped several families to acquire massive

wealth and turn this into corporations that would be important players in Mauritius for the

coming decades, the vast majority of smallholders remained dependent labourers, as their

plots were far too small to sustain households. Thus the free wage labourers emerging after

the end of indenture in 1923 were often highly indebted smallholders who were desperate to

find seasonal employment with millers and owners of large plantations.66

The morcellement,

62 C. S. Griffin, ‘The Sugar Industry and Legislation in Europe’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 17:1 (1902),

pp.41-2. This provides a good example of the academic support given to the policy change from liberalism and

no duties on sugar to a protectionist policy introduced in 1900: “The new [Indian] sugar duty ... renders the

problem of protecting the Indian planters an easy one. A simple remission of the duty on sugar from the English

colonies would serve the same purpose as a countervailing duty on European sugar, and in all probability would

be much easier to pass” (Griffin 1902, p.42). 63

Anonymous, ‘Trade Movements and the War’, Geographical Review 1:3 (1916), pp.209-10. 64

Berthelot (1991), pp.118-9. 65 Allen (1999), pp.72-4; North-Coombes, M. D., Studies in the Political Economy of Mauritius [Moka,

Mauritius]: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 2000, p.141. 66

This issue is rarely raised in Mauritian historiography and if it is then it is local historians who do so. See for

example V. Teelock, Mauritian History: From Its Beginnings to Modern Times, Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma

Gandhi Institute, 2001, pp.323-50.

14

in my interpretation, should be understood as a huge campaign to generate fresh capital and

outsource market risks by sticking to a centralised system of mills on which the former

indentured labourers were now dependent to sell their produce. Nevertheless, the

repercussions of the global crisis led to a relative diversification of the intra-Mauritian nodes

in the global sugar chain. But an intra-island market in which planters and millers negotiated

prices for cane never emerged, as transport facilities were extremely limited. What emerged

instead was a system of scientific breeding of cane that generated new ideas as to how profit

might be generated in the industry.67

While quarrels over the distribution of risk and power

within this market soon emerged in the global recession of the late 1920s and 1930s, the

development of a new bottleneck institution and significant changes in British colonial policy

as well as in the capitalist world system were to provide the solution for these internal

quarrels, and further consolidate the control of the chain in the hands of the plantocracy and

their lobbying institutions.

The Mauritian sugar sector as a system of income redistribution (1919-1937)

The second development was the emergence of a new organisation for marketing and

financing the Mauritian sugar industry. While at first former British governors like Farquhar

supported the planters’ interests within the imperial system of trade preferences, after the

establishment of the MCC Mauritian planters and merchants took lobbying into their own

hands. The London offices of the British-Mauritian company Blyth Brothers & Co. played an

important role in this process of emancipation of Mauritian private-sector economic

diplomacy until 1919. That year marked major changes in the British Empire’s sugar

commodity chain and triggered the foundation of a new and powerful umbrella organisation

of Mauritian sugar producers.

Great Britain, after having already established a system of tariffs to reduce commercial in

favour of military transport during the war,68

introduced a system of imperial preferences in

1919. While free trade had never been fully implemented either in the Empire or in its relation

to global markets, this system marked the end of the free trade propaganda/ideology for the

coming decades. In Mauritius, planters reacted to the strong bargaining position Asian traders

had assumed during the war years with the foundation of the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate

(MSS). The British economist James Edward Meade, writing on the prospects of the

Mauritian economy in 1961, lists the following boards and associations for the Mauritian

sugar industry:

• The MCA as the umbrella organisation of planters, millers and others

connected to the industry.

• The Mauritius Sugar Syndicate is exclusively a marketing organisation. It

handles the whole crop of the colony and, jointly with the Chamber, is

responsible for the discharge of obligations under the Commonwealth and

International Sugar Agreements.

• The Central Arbitration and Control Board as a semi-official body that

determines conditions and terms for the sale of cane to mills.

67

W. K. Storey, ‘Small-Scale Sugar Cane Farmers and Biotechnology in Mauritius: The “Uba” Riots of 1937’,

Agricultural History 69 (1995), pp.163-76. 68 Mahler (1981), p.475.

15

• The Mauritius Sugar Producers Association as an employers’ union

representing the millers’ interests towards the planters.69

The marketing dimension of the MSS highlighted by Meade dates back to the interwar period.

It is particularly interesting that the colonial government sanctioned the handling of the whole

crop by the MSS following the first substantial and widespread riot of small planters. In 1937,

due to a transmission of reduced world-market prices from the millers further along the chain

to the small planters,70

a large group of the latter attacked one of the mills that had declared it

would buy up their sugar cane at reduced prices only. Four planters died in the ensuing

shootout and a commission of enquiry was set up. Following the recommendations of this

commission, the MSS was officially turned into the bottleneck that from now on mediated

between the Mauritian nodes in the sugar commodity chain and the outside world. Already

before 1937 the MSS had been in charge of selling all Mauritian sugar on the world market.

But this had been by way of a series of agreements among local businesses. While a

substantial part was exported at a guaranteed price under the system of imperial preferences,

the remainder was sold according to shifting world-market prices. The overall income was

then pooled and evenly distributed among the millers and owners of large plantations

according to the amount of tons that had been delivered to the MSS at the end of the crop

season. Smallholders might be described as an appendix to this system as they sold their canes

via brokers to millers and received sugar in return. This sugar could then be passed on to the

MSS in another transaction involving brokers. The crop season was pre-financed by MSS

payments to millers who usually had themselves granted loans to small planters. In years of

low world-market prices the MSS stored a substantial amount of sugar to be marketed in hope

of higher prices in the future. Thus, there was already a redistributive system in existence by

which the millers and owners of large plantations not only pooled and collectively sold their

sugar, but also shared the market risk for the small amount of sugar sold on the world market

at the same time. However this redistributive system did not extend to the small planters who

had to sell their cane to neighbouring mills. These mills fixed prices and kept a substantial

margin as their share. They could do so, because the smallholders suffered from adverse

transport conditions that hindered the emergence of a (anyway limited) competition among

millers for canes. After the 1937 riots, this bottleneck in the chain between smallholders and

millers was given up in favour of a system of general redistribution of market gains and

risks.71

One important aspect enabling the institutionalisation of this system was that there was a

matching institutionalisation on the international sphere. In 1937, Britain ratified the

International Sugar Agreement (ISA). The ISA provisioned Mauritius as well as other

colonies and Commonwealth countries with a range of fixed annual quota for exports to the

London market. This put an end to a series of policy changes in the 1920s and 1930s. Before

1937, Britain had switched rather erratically between protecting its home markets by reducing

or abolishing preferences for producers in the colonies on the one hand, and on the other hand

extending preferences to subsidise ailing Mauritian and other colonial producers.

Furthermore, Britain and other contracting parties of the ISA mutually acknowledged existing

69 J. .E. Meade, The Economic and Social Structure of Mauritius (Report to the Governor of Mauritius), London:

Methuen, 1961, pp.79-80. 70

Small planters in 1960 owned and worked 40% of the Mauritian land under cane (Meade 1961). 71

C. A. Hooper, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Unrest on Sugar Estates in Mauritius, 1937, Port

Louis, Mauritius: Government Printer, 1938; Meade (1961); LSE archives, Meade Files/Meade_5.

16

quota systems to the degree that these were written into the agreement (albeit some of them

amended following negotiations).72

From imperial preferences to the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement (1951) and the

Lomé Convention (1975)

When the British Empire began to decompose after the Second World War, the United

Kingdom in concert with other European colonial powers had already come up with a

safeguard system. In the late war years preparations were made to set up a number of

agreements and institutions that would regulate international trade in the decades to come

(Bretton Woods, United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etcetera). The

Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), ratified in 1947, established a system of

trade regimes and codes of conduct for the colonial powers,73

as well as their colonies, which

was to be transferred one to one in cases of transition from a colonial to a postcolonial state.74

Mauritius as a British colony became a member of the GATT in 1947; and after independence

in 1968, a simple one page letter dated 4 April 1968 sent by the British government to the

GATT director was sufficient to assure Mauritian accession to GATT according to provisions

reserved for newly independent countries in 1967.75

Under GATT, trade in all goods with

special provisions for former colonies, other bilateral or multi-lateral trade agreements signed

by one or more member states had to be presented to and accepted by all other members.

When the British government implemented the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement (CSA) in

1951, granting an annual purchase of 1.8 million metric tons of cane sugar from

Commonwealth sugar producers at a guaranteed price, this agreement had to be passed within

GATT. Later, the CSA had to be integrated into the emerging European Economic

Community. The Common Agricultural Policy, protecting and subsidising EU producers

heavily against world-market competition, strongly resembles the principles of the CSA in its

seclusion of world-market mechanisms. Whereas other imports of sugar were levelled by high

import duties to European prices after subsidies, seventy-nine former European colonies in

Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific were granted intra-EU prices for their agricultural

products under the Lomé Convention ratified in 1975.76

As sugar represented about 90 per

cent of the country’s export income at the time of Mauritian independence in 1968 (with only

minor changes over the following fifteen years), the guaranteed price was a substantial

contribution to the policy of export-led development started with the opening of an Export

Processing Zone (EPZ) in 1970.77

A boom in textile and garment production in the Mauritian

EPZ was heavily financed by capital from the local sugar industry, turning the country not

72 See C. L. Gilbert, ‘International Commodity Agreements: An Obituary Notice’, World Development 24:1

(1996), pp.1-19. 73

B. M. Hoekman & M. M. Kostecki, The Political Economy of the World Trading System: The WTO and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p.38. It is important to note that agreements such as the CSA

and the Lomé Convention also needed to be matched with provisions of the ISA, which was amended in 1954

and 1974 (Gilbert 1996). 74

GATT, The Territorial Application of the GATT Agreement: A Provisional List of Territories to Which the Agreement Is Applied, Stanford, USA, Stanford University Library, GATT Digital Archives GATT/CP/108,

16/04/1951, http://gatt.stanford.edu/bin/detail?fileID=1836506882, 16/04/1951 accessed 11 May 2012. 75

GATT, Status of Mauritius, Stanford, USA, Stanford University Library, De Facto Application of the GATT

L/3003, 10/04/1968, http://gatt.stanford.edu/bin/detail?fileID=1167170839, 10/04/1968 accessed 11 May 2012. 76

Mahler (1981), pp.476-80. 77 P. Neveling, ‘Spirits of Capitalism and the De-Alienation of Workers: A Historical Perspective on the

Mauritian Garment Industry’, Working paper GZAA, MLU Halle-Wittenberg, 2006; P. Neveling, ‘Flexible

Capitalism and Transactional Orders in Colonial and Postcolonial Mauritius: A Post-Occidentalist View’, in J.

Kjaerulf and J. K. Jensen (eds), Flexible Capitalism: Exchange and Ambiguity at Work, Oxford: Berghahn,

under review.

17

only into what some have called an economic miracle in the Indian Ocean,78

but also into the

EPZ with the highest rate of local capital worldwide.79

After independence, Mauritian economic diplomacy continued as a joint endeavour of the

postcolonial state and the private sector. Until the early 1990s, Mauritian governments

seriously lacked funding to send delegates to Brussels or London for the sake of tariff

negotiations. These instead were pursued with the support of the MSS, MCC and MCA

representatives in European countries, and helped to negotiate the highest of all sugar quotas

among ACP countries in 1975.80

The trade regime established after the Second World War cannot be understood and

interpreted without a short reference to its dominant ideologies. While questions of how to

achieve economic development had been a major concern during the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, the scope of these debates was limited to the respective spheres controlled

by a single imperial power. With the emergence of institutions of global significance, such as

the GATT, the idea of development was given a new twist. The world was from now on

divided into three regions that were positioned along a hierarchy determined by economic

variables such as GDP.81

Although in terms of its sugar industry Mauritius was an

industrialised country, its GDP and other variables positioned the island on the

underdeveloped side of the hierarchy: the Third World. Along with this division of the world

came the ideologies of development and modernisation that set up fixed patterns of action to

be followed in order to improve a country’s position. Thus, one can speak of a neo-

evolutionary concept that positioned nations and their economies in time according to their

stages of development.82

Inherent in the promise of development and prosperity was a system

of aims and norms inscribed into GATT which are circumscribed in its ‘Preamble’:

Recognizing that their relations in the field of trade and economic endeavour

should be conducted with a view to raising standards of living, ensuring full

employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income and effective

demand, developing the full use of the resources of the world and expanding the

production and exchange of goods,

Being desirous of contributing to these objectives by entering into reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements directed to the substantial reduction of

tariffs and other barriers to trade and to the elimination of discriminatory

treatment in international commerce.83

It was exactly this concept of reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements that was

transformed in the heydays of development policies in 1965. This served to legitimise

preferential trading agreements between the EEC and former European colonies, although

78

I. Aladin, Economic Miracle in the Indian Ocean: Can Mauritius Show the Way? Stanley: Editions de l’Océan

Indien, 1993; A. Subramanian and D. Roy, ‘Who Can Explain the Mauritian Miracle: Meade, Romer, Sachs or

Rodrik?’ IMF Working Paper WP/01/116 (2001). 79

Neveling (2006). 80

Bräutigam (2005). 81

See A. Escobar, ‘Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention and Management of the Third World’,

Cultural Anthropology 3:4 (1988), pp.428-43. 82

J. Ferguson, ‘Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development’, in A. Loomba et al. (eds),

Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 83

GATT, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: Rule 1 July 1986,

http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_e.pdf, date accessed 11 May 2012, pp.105, emphasis added.

18

they were non-reciprocal.84

On paper, the industrial countries volunteered to forego the norm

of reciprocity in order to give trade benefits to underdeveloped countries and hence allow

them to develop. But the EEC, for example, not only chose which country to grant such

benefits to and which not to according to a postcolonial nation’s political performance; it also

gained control over substantial shares of goods traded on the world market under the system

of trade preferences. As outlined above, and similar to economic diplomacy in the nineteenth

century, the Mauritian private sector was very active lobbying in Brussels; only this time, it

was not the British governors supporting them but the government of independent Mauritius.

From Lomé and GATT to WTO (1995)

The Uruguay Round, initiated in 1986, laid the grounds for the foundation of the WTO in

1995. Once again, and for the second time after the rise of free trade ideology in mid-

nineteenth century Britain, the capitalist world economy went into a phase of trade

liberalisation claiming to end all other bilateral and multi-lateral trade agreements. What this

meant for Mauritius is best illustrated by the events around the ministerial conference of the

WTO in Cancun in 2003. Since the foundation of the WTO, the way in which global trade

liberalisation was to be achieved has been a highly controversial issue. Every second year,

ministers of member states, WTO delegates, lobbyists representing transnational companies

and delegations from large international NGOs meet to either follow up or open up a new

round of negotiations.85

These rounds are split according to sectors: trade in agricultural

goods, trade in non-agricultural goods and the newly emerging global trade in services framed

in the Global Agreement on Trade in Services.

In 2003, Mauritius was a member of several pressure groups, each consisting of nation states

grouped together along the lines of shared interests in trade of one of the sectors outlined

above. An example of such a type of formation is the group of ACP states that in preparation

for the 2003 summit met in Fiji in May to agree on common grounds for trade in sugar cane.86

The Mauritian Minister of Industry and Commerce, Jayen Cuttaree, led this group of nation

states as spokesperson. Another group was the Organisation of African Union (OAU), which

tried to bring together the commercial interests of African nations as the least developed of all

continents. Given that Mauritius was one of the few African countries that could afford to

employ a decent number of representatives in the WTO headquarters in Geneva, it was no

surprise that Jayen Cuttaree acted as spokesman for the OAU as well. This is a coincidence of

representations of obviously very different interests: whereas the OAU objected to the US and

EU insistence on agricultural preferences as it harmed the export prospects of most African

countries, the ACP states supported the EU/US initiative as all countries profited from

preferential access to the European market. Thus, the Mauritian position in Cancun was

somewhat schizophrenic as it went along with the ACP in trade in agricultural goods, joined

the OAU in their demand for extended protectionism and financial support in trade in non-

agricultural goods based on the notion that underdevelopment had resulted from colonisation

and therefore a gesture of reciprocity was needed from the former colonisers, and took sides

with the EU/US position on opening up trade in services as most Mauritian companies hoped

to profit from expansion to the East African states. Thus Mauritius in 2003 was by no means a

84

See A. Ziai, ‘From Development Discourse to the Discourse of Globalisation’, Sociologus 60:1 (2010), pp.41-

70. 85

Hoekman & Kostecki (2001). 86

The following description is based on research during two periods of field research in Mauritius in 2003 and

2004, and builds on various articles published in the Mauritian daily L’Express in 2003, among other sources of

information.

19

coherent national economy represented by its government in the Cancun negotiation round.

The national policy was, in terms of global trading agreements, divided according to its main

economic sectors: sugar cane, textiles and garments, tourism and services. Along the

commodity chains of these sectors, the Mauritian government took up a Janus-headed stance:

one time promoting liberalisation, another time protectionism. Thus, what had started as a

seemingly small-scale endeavour in economic diplomacy in the years before 1825 had turned

into a full-scale foreign policy operation. The dimensions of this operation became even more

evident when Mauritian minister Jayen Cuttaree ran for the post of the Director General of the

WTO (and lost to the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Pascal Lamy).

Conclusion

My analysis of the history of Mauritian sugar production and its integration into global

capitalism has shown the shortcomings of the GCC or GVC approaches. The principal

mechanisms of this industry and its commodity chain’s long history cannot be identified if the

analytical focus is on companies buying or selling sugar and therefore creating value. This is

not to say that companies and their networks do not play an important role in the Mauritian

sugar sector. But this sector was embedded into the capitalist world system in such a way that

one of the central analytical distinctions of the GCC approach – for example, that of buyer- or

producer-driven chains – is rather insignificant here. Instead, for a period of nearly two

hundred years, what was central was always economic diplomacy: how to best negotiate a

guaranteed amount of Mauritian sugar to be purchased by the British Empire, the

Commonwealth or the European Union (and its forerunner organisations). This, in other

words, meant how to best insure market access in terms of export quota and price guarantees.

One might object that the politico-economic entities involved in these negotiations and deals

(e.g. the Mauritian Sugar Syndicate or the Colonial Office) represented a seller-buyer relation.

But their actual dealings with one another can hardly be understood if notions of

competitiveness and value creation are applied. This would involve taking the capitalist world

system for something that it is explicitly not: a system based on rational economic calculus

and action.

One of the many cases in point that have emphasised the importance of other factors than

economic calculus for my analysis is the political and economic turmoil around the abolition

of slavery in Mauritius. In a paper on what he calls the great expansion of the capitalist world

system from 1750 to 1850, Wallerstein argues that besides having been integrated into

commodity chains as producers, slaves also had been turned into objects of capital investment

and that the slave markets were subject to price fluctuations and thus speculation.87

When the

Mauritian planters were granted compensation for the release of their slaves, it was exactly

the second, speculative dimension that was, accompanied by the notion of racial superiority, a

heated subject in the negotiations and sometimes violent uprisings in Mauritius. But what was

negotiated in a larger framework was Mauritius’ future position in the British Empire, the

dominant power in the capitalist world economy in those days:

We have tried to establish that incorporation involved the integration of the

production sphere into the commodity chains of the capitalist world-economy and

that this integration tended to require, in the period of incorporation, both the

establishment of larger units of economic decision-making (including often, but

not always, plantations) and the increased coercion of the labour force.88

87

Wallerstein (1988), p.129. 88 Wallerstein (1988), p.130.

20

Decisive in the case of early Mauritian production were the willingness of various governors

to give out loans for the industry, the planters’ success in negotiating financial compensation

for the abolition of slavery and the various economic institutions they founded in Mauritius.

But the larger economic unit referred to in the quote above was located in London, and

although various institutions and social practices – such as Parliament, the Colonial Office,

lobbying and competition with other sugar-producing colonies – were involved, the larger

unit can only be defined as the relative positioning of Mauritius within the overall system of

liberal and protectionist trade policy and ideology. From the perspective of Mauritian sugar,

the oscillation between liberalism and protectionism within this system has remained the same

until today – despite changes in the powers that determine the politics within larger units of

decision making. It was the West Indian sugar preferences that were later re-established in the

imperial preference system, it was the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement that paved the way

into the preferential system of the EU market; and it is the preferential EU system that is at

stake, when trade in agricultural goods is negotiated in the WTO ministerial rounds.

To relate these developments to a Mauritian periodisation of globalisation along the lines of

the liberal-protectionist sugar commodity chain, I want to shortly sum up efforts to split up

globalisation into different phases by another author.

Arrighi divides the expansion of the capitalist world economy along the lines of dominant

powers. According to him, first Genoa, then the Netherlands, the British Empire and finally

the US dictated the terms of world trade. Each of the successive powers relied on a specific

form of financial backing through which it exerted its dominance. The period from 1800 to

2000 in his perspective saw the shift of the centre from the British Empire to the US.

Prominent events that triggered the shift were what he calls a global depression from 1873

until 1896 and the thirty-year crisis from 1914 to 1945. The demise of the US system of

capital accumulation in his view was manifested in the 1970s oil crisis.89

Major developments

that determine this periodisation of globalisation are tied to both the emergence and the

transformations within the system of nation states and the worldwide capitalist system. Crisis

is the rule in this system and leads to the reconstitution on new and enlarged foundations,

whereas long periods of stability and expansion are exceptional. Systemic cycles of

accumulation are central to Arrighi’s periods of globalisation and follow the succession of

core powers (Genoa, Netherlands, Great Britain, US). Each cycle is longer than one century,

and thus differs from periodisations based on price-logistics cycles (such as the Kondratieff or

secular cycles) that look at the “long-term fluctuation in commodity prices”.90

The history of Mauritian sugar production and distribution supports Arrighi’s longue durée-based analysis and shows that what he criticises as only seemingly novel (shifts from Fordism

to flexible accumulation/specialisation)91

are indeed familiar structures.92

The year 1937

might be perceived as the establishment of a Mauritian version of Fordism, as it marked the

end of an internal market for the sale of cane to the mills. But this was a Fordism of very

limited scope: the introduction of the redistributive system under the auspices of the MSS by

no means changed the system of production or the labour regime. Control of the nodes stayed

in the hands of the Mauritian plantocracy as the internal large-scale merchant and in the hands

of the British colonial administration as the external large-scale merchant.

89 Arrighi (2002), p.ix. 90

Arrighi (2002), pp.6-7. 91

D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford:

Blackwell, 1990. 92 Arrighi (2002), p.3.

21

Therefore, a Mauritian periodisation of globalisation according to the island’s integration into

the global commodity chain of sugar first and foremost is related to the fact that sugar is

produced on the island in large scale. This production still shapes much of social life on the

island, has a decisive impact on the appearance of the landscape with 40 percent of acreage

under cane cultivation, and is strongly influencing Mauritian future economic prospects.

These observations point towards an important difference in the notions of historicity of

globalisation in the GCC and the world-systems approaches. Bair has described these as

follows:

However, the GCC camp departs from the world-systems perspective insofar as

global commodity chains are viewed as an emergent organizational form

associated with a more recent and qualitatively novel process of economic

integration: ‘One of the central contentions of the GCC approach is that the

internationalization of production is becoming increasingly integrated in

globalized coordination systems that can be characterized as producer-driven and

buyer-driven commodity chains’ (Gereffi 1996: 429). A key difference then

between the world-systems and GCC camps of commodity chain research is

rooted in this debate regarding whether globalization is better understood as a

contemporary phenomenon enabled by increasingly integrated production

systems, or as a process beginning with the emergence of capitalism in the long

sixteenth century.93

Rather than integrated production systems or the emergence of capitalism in the long

sixteenth century, it is the interstate system and its regulatory context of trade policies that

determines a periodisation from the perspective of Mauritian sugar.94

If only inter- or intra-

firm networks are analysed – as in the GCC or GVC approaches – a distinction of the state

and the market is assumed that leads to a conflation of roles in the economy and supports the

fiction of a social division between politics and the economic sector.

When instead this angle is twisted back to the co-operation of governments and the private

sector (in the extreme case of the Caribbean planters these roles overlapped), another possible

periodisation can be questioned. Once such early nineteenth century public-private

partnerships become the focus of analysis, we might need to reconsider suggestions to locate

the emergence of globalisation in the nineteenth century era of free trade. Indeed, the whole

idea that there was an era of free trade in the nineteenth century seems doubtful from the

perspective of Mauritius. An example supporting such doubts is the system of distinguishing

and taxing sugar imports into the British Empire via polarisation introduced in 1854. This

policy stands in contrast to assumptions of an entirely duty- and quota-free British Empire as

presented by several authors.95

While Osterhammel and Petersson, for example, equate the era

of free trade, which they date from 1846 to 1880,96

with the emergence of a global economy

and the emergence of a global consciousness, one might add another example that contradicts

this periodisation. Campaigning for the abolition of slavery was the first global movement

that showed such a consciousness: not so much in terms of the often invoked consumption

patterns but in terms of a conscious critique of the labour regime established along

commodity chains across the globe. Therefore, it is important to look at the economic calculus

and the morals that guide the establishment of global trading regimes as well as their

contestations. Given that sugar brought Mauritius into the sphere of global capitalist

93

Bair (2005), p.157. 94

Bair (2005), p.168. 95

E.g. Mahler (1981), p.475. 96 Osterhammel & Petersson (2007), pp.60-3.

22

production, there are minor factors, such as the world-market prices and overall global

economic developments that only in moments of fundamental crisis, such as in 1937, led to

internal, but never to external, regulatory procedures within the Mauritian nodes of the chain.

What therefore in the long run determines the perspective on globalisation from a Mauritian’s

perspective is maybe best portrayed in the following quote from a Mauritian weekly on the

island’s economic prospects in times of crisis:

Mauritius promotes itself as a hub for Indian Ocean trade. Ships from around the

world deliver their cargo in Port Louis and load up for onward trips to Asia,

Europe, Africa and America. American and French companies send agents to

Mauritius, anticipating big profits from trading with the region. Mauritius

develops a Freeport to encourage international trade and to position the island as a

regional warehousing and processing centre.

These descriptions sound as if they were lifted from a modern day report

analyzing the Mauritian economy. But in fact this actually describes the Mauritian

economy as it was 200 years ago, when the island was a thriving Freeport colony,

known as a key stop for international ships along the lucrative trading routes to

India and China.97

97

‘Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Future of Mauritius’ Economy May Lie in Its Past’, Le Week End, 25

November 2001.

23

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27

Other Commodities of Empire Working Papers

WP01: Sandip Hazareesingh, ‘“Chasing commodities over the surface of the globe”: shipping, port development

and the making of networks between Glasgow and Bombay, c.1850-1880’ (October 2007)

WP02: Jonathan Curry-Machado, ‘Sub-imperial globalisation and the phoenix of empire: sugar, engineering and

commerce in nineteenth century Cuba’ (October 2007)

WP03: Jean Stubbs, ‘Reinventing mecca: tobacco in the Dominican Republic, 1763-2007’ (October 2007)

WP04: Miguel Suárez Bosa, ‘The role of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic coal route from the end of the

nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century: corporate strategies’ (January 2008)

WP05: Ayodeji Olukoju, ‘The United Kingdom and the political economy of the global oil-producing nuts and

seeds during the 1930s’ (January 2008)

WP06: Roberto Davini, ‘A global commodity within a rising empire: the history of Bengali raw silk as

connective interplay between the Company Bahadur, the Bengali local economy and society, and the

universal Italian model, c.1750-c.1830’ (February 2008)

WP07: Deana Heath, ‘Obscenity, empire and global networks’ (April 2008)

WP08: David Hyde, ‘Global coffee and decolonisation in Kenya: overproduction, quotas and rural restructuring’

(July 2008)

WP09: Vibha Arora, ‘Routing the commodities of empire through Sikkim (1817-1906)’ (July 2008)

WP10: Kaori O’Connor, ‘Beyond ‘exotic groceries’: tapioca-cassava, a hidden commodity of empire’ (January

2009)

WP11: Jonathan Robins, ‘“The Black Man’s Crop”: cotton, imperialism and public-private development in

Britain’s African colonies, 1900-1918’ (September 2009)

WP12: Jelmer Vos, ‘Of stocks and barter: John Holt and the Kongo rubber trade, 1906-1910’ (September 2009)

WP13: Alan Pryor, ‘Indian Pale Ale: an icon of empire’ (November 2009)

WP14: William G. Clarence Smith, ‘The battle for rubber in the Second World War: cooperation and resistance’

(November 2009)

WP15: Steve Cushion, ‘Cuban Popular Resistance to the 1953 London Sugar Agreement’ (March 2010)

WP16: Jonathan Curry-Machado, ‘In cane’s shadow: the impact of commodity plantations on local subsistence

agriculture on Cuba’s mid-nineteenth century sugar frontier’ (October 2010)

WP17: Teresita A. Levy, ‘Tobacco growers and resistance to American domination in Puerto Rico, 1899-1940’

(October 2010)

All Commodities of Empire Working Papers can be downloaded from the Commodities of Empire website, at

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre/commodities-of-empire/working-papers/index.htm.

28

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nneettwwoorrkkss ffuunnccttiioonneedd;;

33)) TThhee iimmppaacctt ooff aaggeennttss iinn tthhee ppeerriipphheerryy oonn tthhee eessttaabblliisshhmmeenntt aanndd ddeevveellooppmmeenntt ooff

ccoommmmooddiittyy nneettwwoorrkkss:: aass iinnssttiiggaattoorrss aanndd pprroommootteerrss;; tthhrroouugghh tthheeiirr ssoocciiaall,, ccuullttuurraall aanndd

tteecchhnnoollooggiiccaall rreessiissttaannccee;; oorr tthhrroouugghh tthhee pprroodduuccttiioonn ooff aannttii--ccoommmmooddiittiieess;;

44)) TThhee iimmppaacctt ooff ccoommmmooddiittyy cciirrccuullaattiioonn bbootthh oonn tthhee ppeerriipphheerryy,, aanndd oonn tthhee eeccoonnoommiicc,,

ssoocciiaall aanndd ccuullttuurraall lliiffee ooff tthhee mmeettrrooppoolleess;;

55)) TThhee iinntteerrrrooggaattiioonn ooff tthhee ccoonncceepptt ooff ‘‘gglloobbaalliissaattiioonn’’ tthhrroouugghh tthhee ssttuuddyy ooff tthhee hhiissttoorriiccaall

mmoovveemmeenntt aanndd iimmppaacctt ooff ccoommmmooddiittiieess..

wwwwww..ooppeenn..aacc..uukk//AArrttss//ffeerrgguussoonn--cceennttrree//ccoommmmooddiittiieess--ooff--eemmppiirree//iinnddeexx

TThhee FFeerrgguussoonn CCeennttrree ffoorr

AAffrriiccaann aanndd AAssiiaann SSttuuddiieess,,

TThhee OOppeenn UUnniivveerrssiittyy,,

WWaallttoonn HHaallll,,

MMiillttoonn KKeeyynneess MMKK77 66AAAA

IInnssttiittuuttee ffoorr tthhee SSttuuddyy ooff tthhee

AAmmeerriiccaass

SScchhooooll ooff AAddvvaanncceedd SSttuuddyy

UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff LLoonnddoonn

SSeennaattee HHoouussee,, MMaalleett SSttrreeeett

LLoonnddoonn WWCC11EE 77HHUU